THROUGH
MOUNTAIN MISTS
Early Settlers of
Their
Descendants...Their Stories...Their Achievements
Lifting the
Mists of History on Their Way of Life
By: Ethelene Dyer Jones
With the
economy in a downslide and the future uncertain,
conditions may behoove us to go back to some old mountain ways of
insuring our
family’s welfare in the long, cold months of late fall and winter.
We call it “putting-up,” the processes
we used to preserve food for future use.
There were many of them used by frugal mountain folk,
industrious people
“to the Nth degree”, as we say here, to save what we grew and gathered
by the
sweat of our brow to grace our tables in winter’s cold.
Drying, pickling, barreling, canning and
mounding-up were a few processes that come to mind.
Drying included stringing green beans
twice. First, “stringing” them to remove
just that, the strings from white half-runners, our favorite variety to
grow in
the mountains. Then came stringing the
unbroken beans by pushing a threaded needle through the middle of each
until a
goodly string was saved. Next came the
drying process—hanging the “strung” beans from a nail in a safe, clean,
out-of the
way place or over a rafter in the attic to await winter’s need for them. The end product of this process had an
interesting name, “Leather Britches.”
When the housewife-cook was ready to prepare a “mess” of them,
she
washed them thoroughly, soaked them until the dryness gave way to
plumpness as
the beans hydrated again, and then cooked them slowly (in an iron pot)
with a
piece of “fat-back” pork meat.
Drying included many mountain
products, among which were October beans (somewhat like present-day
Pinto
beans), peas of various sorts—the early spring sweet peas to make
split-pea
soup, several varieties of “field” peas, as black-eyed peas, Crowder
peas, and
purple-hull peas. These were shelled,
dried in the sun, and put into bags to await winter meals.
On my Daddy’s farm, we grew a lot of peas,
and the dried peas were “beaten out” on a tarpaulin on the ground, and
when the
peas were thus out of the hull, they were put into a bucket, and held
up and
“winnowed” to blow the husks out. Then
the beautiful dry peas were ready to store, labeled by kind, for winter
use. Sometimes we sold a few bushels of
the winnowed peas, what we would not need.
The extra money for a few bushels of peas always helped out in
our shortfall
of cash.
Drying fruits was another skill. We
used scaffolds on which we dried
fruits—apples and peaches cut into slices, and dried carefully in the
sun for
several days with a screen-wire covering over the scaffold to prevent
insects
from harming the fruit. The scaffolded
fruit was always brought inside at night to prevent its getting wet
with dew.
One of the most delectable desserts
imaginable was dried-fruit (apple) cake, with the layers stacked
several high
and a mixture of cooked dried apples with sugar and cinnamon added,
spread on
each thin cake layer for icing.
Pumpkin was dried, too, much like
green beans, by stringing strips on a thread and hanging this cache to
dry. The country cook knew how to turn
dried pumpkin into pumpkin pies or how to add just the right amount of
dried
pumpkin to winter soups with potatoes, onions, carrots and stew meat,
to make
the soup delicious. The drying process
guaranteed winter use of pumpkin, for this product, unless properly
preserved,
would not last through the winter. It
had a short “shelf life” in the pumpkin shell.
Pickling was another process
altogether. We pickeled beans, corn,
cabbage and cucumbers, to name a few vegetables thus preserved. For these “putting-up” processes, we had to
have crocks, or ceramic churns, in which to layer, process and then
store the
prepared vegetables.
Beans and corn were cooked
(separately)
until done. Then they were placed in
churns with salt between each layer and set aside until “pickled.” The pickled product was then washed, and in
more recent years, canned. But a long
time ago, the products were washed off and returned to the crock pots,
covered
with clear water, to lessen the saline taste.
The cabbage were chopped, and place raw, in layers of salt, in
the
pickling churn. The housewife knew, by
daily examination, just when the process of pickling the kraut was
finished,
and washed the cabbage thoroughly and either returned it to the pottery
jar
with fresh water to await winter’s need, or else canned it. Cucumbers were helped along in the pickling
process with a seasoning of dill herb and salt in much the same manner
as the
cabbage from which kraut was made.
Barrels of fresh apples were preserved
by wrapping each in a piece of newspaper and storing in what we called
“the
apple barrel’—a wooden barrel made from upright wooden staves and
secured by
iron bands. Likewise, green tomatoes
were wrapped in newspaper and stored in the “tomato” barrel. We usually had these stored apples and
tomatoes to feast on through Thanksgiving and maybe until Christmas or
after.
It was a happy day for the mountain
housewife when Mason jars became available.
At first they had a tint of green, but when food was placed in
jars and
sealed, and cooked a long time in a water bath (pressure cookers were a
twentieth-century invention), the food the jars contained was a welcome
addition to the winter menu. As a point
of pride, each housewife who set her jars in neat rows, arranged by
category of
food along her cellar shelves, had a virtual showcase of accomplishment. One of the country ways and pastimes was to
visit from farmhouse to farmhouse and see each lady’s handiwork in the
cellar,
her assurance against winter hunger.
Mounding for food preservation
purposes was mainly the task of the man of the house.
He prepared an outside place for the
vegetables that could be “buried” for the winter. Potatoes,
both Irish and sweet, turnips,
carrots and cabbage were “mounded” up, covered in straw, and then with
dirt and
a plank roof overhead to protect them from freezing in the winter
temperatures. When a “mess” was needed,
he went to the appropriate mound to retrieve vegetables for his
household.
All of these methods of preserving the
harvest from the farm have not included sorghum-making, that fall
festival of
sweetness from sorghum cane, which, at the Dyer farm was a September
and
October activity for the whole community.
My father, Jewel Marion Dyer, was the “syrup-maker” for a broad
area.
The syrup, when made, was stored in tin buckets of half- and
gallon-size. This product was our main
money crop to pay
taxes and get fall and winter clothes and shoes. It
was also our “sweetener” when sugar was
scarce, and could be used to sweeten the best gingerbread imaginable
and
various other desserts, as well as being eaten as a food itself with
farm-fresh
butter and hot biscuits on a cold winter morning. And
have you ever tried sorghum syrup over
kraut? If not, you might like to taste
this evening meal dish with pork sausage.
Both ingenuity and necessity led our
forebears to find various means of preserving and providing food for
their
families in days gone by. Maybe we need
to relearn these lessons for this twenty-first century.
c2009 by
Ethelene Dyer
Jones; published Aug. 27, 2009 in The Union Sentinel, Blairsville,
GA.
Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Updated October 5,
2009
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